First look: Jim Lee’s poster for 2012 Hero Complex Film Festival

April 23, 2012 | 12:57 p.m.

This weekend at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books we unveiled the poster for the 2012 Hero Complex Film Festival and the artist is none other than Jim Lee, one of the most celebrated creators in comics and the co-publisher of DC Entertainment. The image evokes Southern California on the move but also has the otherworldly aura of a cosmic messenger enroute to New Genesis — is she coming from the Vega system or Venice Beach? We like to think of her as digital delivery, the muse for the modern filmmakers as Tinseltown relocates to The Grid.

Lee’s majestic sci-fi approach is the newest variation on a theme that began two years ago when Darywn Cooke designed our 2010 poster with a memorably spare representation of elemental power. A year later, Mike Mignola liked the basic motiff — a powerful lone figure holding aloft a giant film reel — but took the 2011 poster into a perfectly monstrous direction.

Now that the new poster is here, what names will be written on it? Check back this Wednesday for more information about the third edition of the Hero Complex Film Festival, which will run May 18-21 at a new location, Regal Cinemas L.A. Live, the great downtown venue where we staged our “Raiders of the Lost Ark” 30th anniversary screening with Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford.